What Actually is the American Economy?

            Twice only in my short life have I experienced mental illness.  Mental illness can be stealth.  In certain ways it can be more difficult to understand and treat than physiological illnesses.  That is why we have psychology and psychiatry.   What do I mean by “mental illness?”  Perhaps the term mental illness is inappropriate jargon.  If one becomes off balance in their daily routine for some unknown reason, is this mental illness?  Mental illness better clarified would mean an ailment or affliction that sustains the test of time.  It is not a temporary navigating of the stormy seas of everyday life.  It would be something that sticks around.  In professional terms that would be categorized as “chronic.”  Some deviant situation that recurs for a length of time likely could cause mental illness, because the mind loses the ability to remember what is healthy.  It would be often in the evolution of man the human mind and body have enabled themselves to survive by the process of accommodation.  When faced with a non-changing environment within which we are forced to operate for financial sustenance, our minds can accommodate the situation by adapting.  Upon scrutiny we may alter our moral or ethical codes to justify our economic freedom.  Is this freedom worth the social and psychological freedom we pursue as human beings?  More astutely characterized is this “American” freedom worth the psychological price?  We cannot be so shallow to recognize many other global cultures are not afforded any civil liberty, so the boundary between human and civil liberty must be defined.  One could use the United States Constitution as “ground zero.”  That could be why many foreign cultures seek asylum in the United States.  They understand, respect, and admire the rights outlined in our Constitution.  Sociologically the challenge is to understand human rights and how they have been defined and implemented by different political regimes.  What is an unacceptable environment?  In the field of labor, an entity that Abraham Lincoln considered synonymous with America, unions were organized to mitigate conditions of labor.  Today the term “labor union,” like many things in non-mainstream America, can elicit bipolar responses.  In recent decades America politically has become more polarized.  The term “mainstream” has gone undercover leaving the defining of our own society to ourselves.  We have become forced to become better educated on our own to survive in an increasingly hypocritical and often evil socio-economic construct.  Once afforded government-provided amenities have vanished.  With them has vanished our quality of life forcing us to buy the creature comforts our country once provided.  This has become the “New American Economy.”  We are living off one another, not for one another.  Ironically and erroneously Republicans shout, “Socialist” at our President, when their already-rooted communist economic infrastructure is the enemy. Grass roots artistic and intellectual aesthetics have become disguised and decreed unimportant.  We are experiencing a modern “Dark Ages” perhaps or perhaps not fueled by a teetering economy.  It is the prospectus of this economy that should be in question.